The author of Fair Dealing and Clean Playing: The Hilldale Club and The Development of Black Professional Baseball, 1910–1932, Neil Lanctot here traces the story of black professional baseball to give us a remarkable perspective on several major themes in modern African American history. Baseball functioned as a critical component in the separate economy catering to black consumers in the urban centers of the North and South, representing a major achievement in black enterprise and institution building. Lanctot considers the initial black response to segregation, the subsequent struggle to establish successful separate enterprises, and the later movement toward integration in the civil rights era.

"Prodigiously researched and thoroughly unsentimental, Neil Lanctot's history of organized black baseball from 1933 through the early 1960s provides an enormously important historical corrective to feel-good versions of baseball integration."—NYTimes